Adele Fogle

FIRST CANADIAN CHAPTER

AVIATORS OF DISTINCTION

The youngest daughter of a Russian mother and Polish father, she grew up in a tiny apartment in Toronto with her parents, sister, aunt and grandmother. “My sister and I slept in the dining room. My aunt paid half the rent so she got the other bedroom. My mother saved every penny she could and sent us to a summer camp. I saw what those kids had and I wanted it too. The girls had cashmere sweaters, they drove cars and had bedrooms of their own.”

She grew up, married and had two children, but by the time her kids were in high school she was looking for a new direction. When a neighbour dropped by and said he was taking flying lessons, I said I wished I could do something like that, and he said, “Come along”. I did.

After about 15 hours of flying time, Fogle was ready to solo. And soon after that, she experienced her first crash landing. “I was landing, come in too fast. I pulled back and the plane stalled. I broke off the nose wheel and rammed the propeller into the ground. I was 37 years old, sitting in a wrecked plane, with all the young kids who hang out at the airports watching me. I felt a little out of my element.”

“I wasn’t at all frightened. I just figured, next time I’ll do it better. I won’t give up. I persevere and persevere. It’s like a flaw in my character.”

When she got her instructor’s licence, there were no jobs so she bought an old Aztec plane and flew as a courier. “I’d leave Toronto at midnight every night for Montreal to deliver the mail. Then I’d wait until 4 a.m. to return with the newspapers.”

Adele became president and owner of Aviation International at Guelph Airpark, where she taught flying, charters planes, did aircraft maintenance, sold fuel and ran a restaurant. A five-foot-four blond with cover-girl good looks, she says “I never felt as much in control of my life as I do now.”

She played a leading role in the founding and operating of the First Canadian Chapter. Her own entry into the aviation business were as unusual and determined as Earhart herself.

There’s no accounting for guts. Or desire. Not when three women with a combined age of 202 fly around the world in a plane so small it could fit into the first few rows of a 747. When Adele, Daphne and Margaret took off from Montreal on May 1 in the 1994 Round the World Air Race, they pitted their knowledge, experience and attitude against all the perils and pratfalls high fliers are heir to: a radio that quit over the Atlantic, a thunderstorm that threw them off course in the Middle East, a typhoon that menaced their flight plan i the Far East, air-traffic controllers who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand them until they lowered their chins and their voices, and the sudden concern for veils when they were tracked by camouflage F-14 in Iran and thought they might be forced to land.